Privacy & Cookies
How this website handles information about you.
This notice covers this website (deargem.ca). Information shared inside therapy sessions is governed separately by the professional confidentiality and record-keeping standards of the Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers, and by the consent paperwork you complete before your first session.
The short version
The site does not ask you to create an account, and nothing you do here is tied to your name. Two analytics tools run in the background so I can see which pages are useful and where the site is confusing. One of them sets cookies. There is no advertising, and nothing is sold or shared with advertisers.
Analytics
Umami
Umami counts page views and clicks on the “Book A Session” buttons. It is privacy-focused and cookieless — it stores nothing on your device and does not track you across websites. It records the page you viewed, the site that referred you, and a coarse device type, browser and country derived from your request. IP addresses are used only momentarily to derive the country and are not stored.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity records anonymised heatmaps and session replays — where people scroll, click and get stuck. Typed input, and anything Clarity identifies as sensitive, is masked before it leaves your browser. Clarity does set cookies:
_clck— a randomly generated ID that links your visits to one another. Expires after one year._clsk— groups the page views within a single visit. Expires after one day.
Microsoft is the data processor for Clarity and may transfer this data outside Canada, including to the United States. See the Microsoft Privacy Statement. You can opt out of Clarity entirely by enabling “Do Not Track” or blocking cookies for this site in your browser.
Booking
Appointments are booked through Jane, a Canadian practice management platform, at deargem.janeapp.com. Clicking a booking button takes you off this site; from that point Jane's own privacy policy and cookies apply. The details you enter there — name, contact information, health information — are held in Jane, not on this website.
If you email hello@deargem.ca, I keep the message and your address in order to reply and to maintain a record of our correspondence. Ordinary email is not a secure channel — please don't send detailed personal health information by email.
How long things are kept
- Umami: aggregate statistics, retained about six months.
- Clarity: session recordings, retained by Microsoft for up to 30 days.
- Email: kept as long as needed for our correspondence, then deleted.
- Clinical records: held in Jane and retained for the period required by the College — separate from this website.
Your rights
Under Canada's PIPEDA — and, if you are in the UK or EU, the GDPR — you can ask what personal information is held about you, ask for a copy, ask for corrections, ask for it to be deleted, and withdraw consent to analytics at any time. Where the GDPR applies, the lawful basis for analytics is legitimate interest in understanding how the site is used; for email, it is your consent in contacting me.
To make a request, or to raise a concern, email hello@deargem.ca. If you are not satisfied with the response, you can contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
Changes
If the tools used on this site change, this page is updated and the date at the top changes with it.